We slept well and were woken at 8 by the builders so decided to get up and go down to the beach for showers. We packed a rucksack with everything we needed and headed of down the coastal path to the shower block. It was open when we got there so I went for first shower, but it was freezing cold and salty water! Yuk. After a while of cursing and jumping in and out of the water I finally managed to wash my hair and get dressed in some clean clothes, it was worth it for being clean but wasn’t a nice experience. Vincent went next and I tried to warm up on the beach, it wasn’t a very warm day but we did spend quite a while watching people fall off surf boards and watching the Bondi surf and rescue team that we had seen on a TV program at James, they did a reality TV show thing called Bondi rescue. After a while we got a bit chilly so we went to look for a net cafe. Vincent found one and we looked at our mail and tried to see if there was anything on in Sydney for us to go to on Friday or Saturday night. We did find one goth club but the Australians aren’t very good at putting things up on line yet so a lot of the info was out of date. We did find a road where there was loads of goth shops though so decided to go there after a spot of lunch. Lunch was not an easy matter however, we wanted to have our boil in the bag curry that we had gotten in Carnegie with some rice but there wasn’t anywhere we were allowed to use our burner, everywhere specifically said ‘no burners’ so we drove up to the road where the shop were and drove down a side road then set up the van as table and chairs inside and cooked inside with the windows open for ventilation. It worked very well and the curry’s were very nice, but sadly the rice I had precooked at James hadn’t fared well out of a fridge and had gone off so we had to chuck a couple of portions.
After lunch we pottered round all the goth shops and chatted to the people there. When we left we decided that we needed to find a loo so looked on the map for the nearest one, which was closed, so we went to the next one which led us off the track we had planned and ended up with us going past a sign for Manly, which the brochure I had found on Sydney recommended. We decided to follow the signs and were rewarded with a lovely little town on the edge of Sydney with a little beach and loo block which we could park near and a pedestrian area where we wandered down listening to bands playing in pubs, chatting to some other English tourists and finding a Cole’s supermarket to buy some supplies. We ended up in a pub that had free pool drinking ‘schooners’ of their cheapest lager (a couple of dollars for an amount between a half and a pint) as the pub claimed to have WiFi and we had hoped to go on line, but it never worked. We slept in a close by residential street at Manly and by this time had done 1310 kilometres.